William Schmidt,
- Tiger Software's Creator
(C) 2007 William Schmidt, Ph. D. - All Rights
Reserved. No reproductions of this blog or
quoting from it
without explicit written consent by its author is
permitted.

Whoever
becomes President in 2009 will have to pick up the pieces of American
foreign policy and assemble
them into something that reverses the simultaneous
trends towards:
1)
militarization (where the logical extension is an isolated and
undemocratic,
unconstitutional American garrison fortress),
2)
pauperization of middle and working class America and
3)
diplomatic isolation and growing anti-Americanism abroad and here, too!

By January 2009, the massive
US trade and governmental debts will have brought
the dollar into further
decline. Interest rates will surely be much higher. The US
will not much longer be able
to outspend all the rest of the world in military spending.
The US stock market has been
boosted by an overseas boom in investments.
Will that continue if the
dollar keeps declining?

In place of US unilateralism
and preemptive war must be forged a new internationalism
that recognizes the limits of
American military power and accepts the reality of the
massive economic growth in
Europe, Asia and now Brazil, too.

The
US dependence on foreign oil must end somehow. It has
clearly ensnared the US
in Middle Eastern hostilities
that pre-date America by 1000 years. Bush has made
matters much worse.
Al-Quida's brand of Islamic fundamentalism would, without the
the Bush Administration's
reinforcement of its stereotypes, be in further decline. Just
as economic growth was ultimately inconsistent with messianic Communism,
a growing Arabic and Iranian
middle class is inconsistent with messianic Islamic fundamentalism.

Two of my professors at
Columbia have written books on these themes:

Zbigniew
BrzezinskiThe Choice:
Global Domination or Global LeadershipBrezizinski is brilliant. But he was wrong about the US war in Viet
Nam in 1965.
There were no dominoes.
And he was wrong about Eastern Europe. I wrote a seminar
paper for him at
Columbia based on sources in the Radio Free Europe library in NYC
which
demonstrated the necessarily liberalizing forces of simple economic growth. He
gave me only an
A-, only checking with approval those points in my paper that agreed
with this
dogmatic view that Communism was a mostly unchanging totalitarian state.

Chalmers Johnson has written forcefully about the "Sorrows of
Empire". Here
is what Wikopedia
has to say: "Johnson believes the enforcement of American
hegemony over the world constitutes
a new form
of global
empire. Whereas traditional empires maintained control over
subject
peoples via colonies,
since World War
II the US
has developed a vast system
of hundreds
of military
bases around the world where it has strategic interests. A
long-time Cold Warrior,
Johnson experienced a political awakening after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, noting that instead of
demobilizing its massive armed
forces, the
US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to
problems both economic
and political. The
result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is
more terrorism against the
US and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home,
and an eventual
disaster for the American economy."
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalmers_Johnson
)

From
Publishers Weekly
This
no-holds-barred indictment of what Johnson calls the post-Cold War American
"global
empire" is not for the faint of heart. Among the opening images is a plastic bag
containing
three pairs of bloodied men's underwear gathered as evidence from the brutal
1995
gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two American marines and an American
sailor,
a crime that was officially passed off as an aberration but may qualify more accurately
as
another move in the endgame of, in Johnson's astringent phrase, "stealth
imperialism." In his
highly
critical appraisal of the global U.S. military presence, Johnson, president of the Japan
Policy
Research Institute and prolific commentator on Japan and Asia, focuses on the effects
of
"blowback," a term coined by the CIA to denote the unintended consequences of
policies
that
were in many cases kept secret from the American public. From anti-Chinese pogroms
carried
out by U.S.-trained soldiers in Indonesia to the viciously suppressed 1980 pro-democracy
demonstration
in Kwangju, South Korea, Johnson examines the fallout from what he sees as
American
"economic colonialism." Detailed assessments of American engagement in Japan,
Korea
and
China are coupled with closer-to-home observations on the liquidation of American jobs
in
places such as Birmingham, Ala., and Pittsburgh, the latter yet another consequence
of
the massive U.S. trade deficit with the countries of East Asia. Brazenly spending
ever-swollen
defense
budgets, Johnson argues, the Pentagon is fueling an "antiglobalization time
bomb" that
could
blow up at any moment. His chilling conclusion--backed by copious and livid detail--is
that
a
nation reaps precisely what it sows. (Apr.)

Profound Pessimism

I
talked with Johnson recently at a book signing. He is profoundly pessimistic.
The US
stock
market may now be starting to reflect his dismal expectations for the US economy
and
the American middle class. Look at the current Peerless chart of the DJI, the
current
Tiger
chart of US Housing Stocks and the 5-years charts of Boeing and Halliburton. The
US
economy is fragmenting and Americans are becoming frightened. Perhaps, it's time
to
read Gibbons on the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire to see if we can learn
something
from history. For years, British universities offered this a required reading.
They
were smart. They wanted to keep their empire around for a long time.

DJI - 7/26/2007 Note DJI fell nearly 200 more today.

Tiger Index of 30 US Housing Stocks - 7/26/2007
Please
note: we like to trade with the trend of the last major Peerless
signal.
This is a Sell. So, don't trust the short-term Buy.

Boeing Weekly - Five Years: 2002-2007

Halliburton Weekly - Five Years: 2002-2007

Watch all these charts along with Crude Oil. Will there be
an attack on Iran next?
See
blog from earlier this week.